Pick up a planet. Fling it at a star.
Joined September 2026
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Meet Sol. Grab a planet, fling it past him, and let real gravity do the rest. Pop!
Orbit Slinger is out now on iPhone and iPad. No ads, no tracking, no accounts. 🪐 apps.apple.com/us/app/orbit-…
Tap Earth and it tells you about itself. 🌍
The real one races around the Sun at about 30 km every second, so in the last minute you traveled roughly 1,800 km without leaving your chair.
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Yes, planets can circle a dead star. The first planets ever found beyond our solar system orbit a pulsar, spotted in 1992. 🔦
A pulsar's beams sweep around like a lighthouse, and real ones can spin hundreds of times a second.
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Pedal to the metal, gently. Psyche's electric thrusters push about as hard as three quarters resting in your palm.
The trick is time. They fire for months on end, after a Mars flyby in May handed it a free boost.
Tiny shove, years long, a metal world at the end.
“It’s now ‘pedal to the metal’ to the asteroid Psyche,” said Don Han, the Psyche mission’s navigation lead.
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft has fired up its thrusters and will reach the metal-rich asteroid of the same name by the summer of 2029.
Learn more: go.nasa.gov/4yRhoKU
ALT As depicted in this artist’s concept, NASA’s Psyche spacecraft will approach the metal-rich asteroid Psyche in summer 2029 using its solar electric propulsion system, powered by large cross-shaped solar arrays. NASA/JPL-Caltech
Hubble has no engine. It never did.
Every boost it got came from a Space Shuttle pushing it higher. The last visit was 2009. Since then, thin air has been dragging it down.
So whoever services it next brings what a 36-year-old telescope can't make itself: altitude.
NASA issued a Request for Information to learn more about industry capabilities for in-space servicing to support the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope: science.nasa.gov/missions/hu…
ALT The Hubble Space Telescope in orbit above Earth.
Flybys nudge moonlets onto crossing paths. Twice, they smash. 🎱
Real moons can be luckier: Saturn's Janus and Epimetheus share almost the same orbit and swap places about every four years instead of colliding.
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They don't unfold with motors. They unroll like a tape measure.
Each boom is a thin composite strip stored rolled flat. Let it go and it springs back straight, pulling the solar blanket out behind it.
Spring energy does the work, so fewer moving parts can fail.
Next Week’s Spacewalk: Unfurling the ISS’s Next Generation Solar Arrays
During next week’s spacewalk, astronauts will install new Roll-Out Solar Arrays (ROSAs) on the International Space Station. In the images you can already see two of them still tightly folded and ready for deployment, alongside views of how these flexible, high-efficiency arrays look once they have been rolled out and are fully operational in orbit.
Sky calendar 🔭
Before dawn Mon, Nov 2: the half-lit Moon sits close to Jupiter and Mars, with the Beehive Cluster nearby. Look east.
Night of Nov 17–18: the Leonid meteor shower peaks. The Moon sets around midnight, so watch from then until dawn, facing east toward Leo.
Crash, orbit, or escape? Jupiter drifts in toward the Sun. Slowed down so you can call it. Guess below, reveal in two hours. ☀️
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Io isn't volcanic because it's big. It's volcanic because of its neighbors.
Io laps Jupiter 4 times for every 2 by Europa and 1 by Ganymede. That rhythm keeps its orbit oval, so Jupiter's tides squeeze it each trip, flexing the ground up to 100 m.
A moon kneaded into lava.
Those colors are a clue. They show up when a cloud's ice crystals are all nearly the same size, so they bend sunlight the same way and split it into a rainbow.
And Mars's highest clouds aren't even water. They're frozen carbon dioxide. Clouds made of what we exhale.
Hit or miss? Jupiter and Saturn, same lane, closing in. Slowed down so you can call it. Guess below, reveal in two hours. 🪐
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Fitting for a ghost: this light left Carina about 7,500 years ago.
It's fading for real, too. Winds and radiation from giants like Eta Carinae keep blowing these clouds apart. Chandra sees the hot gas, Webb the dust still hanging on.
Ghost or star nursery? Why not both.
Ghosted by the universe, just in time for Halloween!🎃 This eerie structure, combining data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory & @NASAWebb, is part of the Carina Nebula, located about 7,500 light years from Earth in our Milky Way galaxy. 👻s.si.edu/reaper
ALT This is a composite image of a small portion of the Carina Nebula reveals a striking golden-orange cloud of gas and dust that loosely resembles a ghostly figure. Its glowing hooded head and a sweeping cape-like tail stretch through a star-filled background of rich blues, reds, and greens. Brilliant blue-white stars sparkle in the scene, while bright pink dots of X-ray light reveal young stars scattered across this eerie stellar nursery.
That glow isn't fire. It's sunlight.
The ground is already in Earth's shadow, but the rocket has climbed back into the sun. Up there the exhaust spreads out wide in the thin air and catches the light.
Night below, daylight above. Ever spotted one from the ground?
Space jellyfish from a plane window
From high above, the Long March 6A Y30’s plume becomes a living diagram of twilight: a long, glowing ribbon that begins in deep sunset crimson and amber along the lower contrail, then flares into an electric-blue “space jellyfish” as it expands through the mesosphere. In one continuous streak the color shift draws Earth’s shadow line across the sky in real time—sunset below, the edge of night above.
Rocket: Long March 6A Y30
Date-Time: October 23, 2026, 10:15 UTC
Credit: CNSPACE
Orbit or escape? Jupiter gets flung hard past the Sun. Guess below, reveal in two hours. 🪐
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DART didn't knock Dimorphos away. It slowed it, so the moonlet fell into a tighter loop around Didymos, about 32 minutes shorter.
Slow down, fall inward, go around faster. Orbits are weird.
Now Hera weighs it: how much came from the hit vs. the debris it threw off?
Our Hera spacecraft can now see Didymos and Dimorphos as two separate asteroids!
Coming closer, it will study the effects of NASA's 2022 DART impact and help advance asteroid deflection as a planetary defence technique.
The first detailed images of Dimorphos are expected on 25 November.
Follow Hera’s journey with the Hera Space Companion 👉 hera.esa.int
🔗esa.int/Space_Safety/Hera/Fi…
ALT Hera's first view of the separate Didymos and Dimorphos asteroids
Hit or miss? Mercury vs. the titan. Guess below, reveal in two hours. 🪐
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